


If It's Dark Outside

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Post - Season 02, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:30:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2476433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three months after Election Night, Will and Mac are still trying to untangle the complexities of the Genoa story, Jerry Dantana's lawsuit, and their new relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. you were a low moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fredesrojo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredesrojo/gifts).



> **A/N:** I blame everyone who's encouraged this. It was supposed to be a quick one-shot, but here we are. I think initially it was just supposed to be short and smutty, but then I got to thinking, which is dangerous enough. 
> 
> So okay, the title and the lyrics referenced come from "[Bible Belt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QpyNNrPb8I)" by Dry the River which is a very dangerous song if you are me and also inspired the fic [the trick of it is](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1019648), one of my earlier Newsroom fics. This fic was also inspired by two (NSFW-ish) pictures which can be found [here](http://ofhouseadama.tumblr.com/post/99933084809) and [here](http://ofhouseadama.tumblr.com/post/99844283284) on my tumblr. 
> 
> I don't really know what this is? Like I said it originally was supposed to be short and smutty. Now it's long and has smut. I guess it's "a weekend in the life" of Will and Mac. Takes place during the "Winter" portion of [A Time to Keep](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1426057), if you squint. Kind of a 2.01 redux.

_But you swear blind there is no weight in the water pail._   
_You say "My love, you take the cards that you're dealt._   
_Cause there's no guiding light arching a line to Bethlehem._   
_If it's dark outside you light the fire yourself."_

 

* * *

 

Will wonders if they should start keeping chairs in this hallway. It already feels enough like waiting to be called into the principal’s office for interrogation; it might as well look the part. It would be harder to doze off in a chair than propped up against the wall. Not that he’s in danger of falling asleep at the moment, since its 2 o’clock on a Saturday, but being off the ground while Rebecca and her legal team prep Mac for her deposition with Dantana’s lawyers on Monday would be nice.

Considering that he has no idea what state Mac is going to walk out of the room in.

 _Maggie_ was reduced to tears and soaked through the shoulder of his sweater before she could calm down, Jim looked like he was going to put his fist through something until Mac took him for a walk through Bryant Park and the two of them returned forty minutes later suspiciously quiet. Sloan hung out in his office, manic and talkative, and he himself had to be dragged down to Hang Chews for an emergency three fingers (and then other three, and another) of Jameson.

It’s another forty minutes before the door to the executive conference room opens. Becca’s legal team sweeps through first, in coats and scarves and hats, muttering about a Starbucks run. MacKenzie tentatively steps out next, her coat folded over her arm as she finishes up her conversation with Becca, who brushes a hand down her arm with a curt nod before disappearing back into the conference room.

Before she notices the expression on her face is one of pure anxiety; whatever she’s been feeling for the past few hours has been systematically shoved down and now she’s having trouble holding it there. The line of her mouth tightens, her shoulders curving in, her eyes taking on the glassy countenance that means that she is desperately trying to hold on.

Until she spots him and pastes a smile on her face.

“You could have waited in your office.”

Standing, he rolls his eyes instead of saying _Not really_ , or _So you could wait until you stopped crying to come find me?_ or half a dozen other things that would just result in the mask of forced calm clamping down so hard that even he can’t pry it off.

“Could have,” he says, gently lifting her coat out of her grasp, unfolding it, and holding it open for her to put it on. “But I elected not to.”

Sighing, Mac protests. “I need to finish going through the reports on the attack in Aleppo.” But she lets him help her put on her coat anyway, and then wrap her scarf around her neck, which he takes as a good sign. “We should stay a few more hours.”

“It can wait until Monday,” he says, shrugging on his own coat, patting down the pockets for his gloves when Mac finds her own, sliding them onto her hands.

She sighs again, the smile faltering. “The deposition is Monday, I won’t have any time before the first rundown.”

“Then we’ll staff it out,” he assures her, reaching for her hand. “There is no reason Jim or Kendra can’t do it.”

MacKenzie laces their fingers together, adjusting her purse over her shoulder while narrowing her eyes. “You are infuriatingly calm.”

“I stopped being nervous about trials in the eighties,” Will says with a shrug. “When it comes time to worry, I’ll worry, and doubtlessly you’ll be the first to know.”

“Wonderful,” she deadpans, forehead creasing with unease.

He does his best to get her out of the building as quickly as possible. Mac is nearly vibrating next to him by the time the elevator opens out onto the lobby. And of course she is—Jerry and his lawyers have pegged her as the weakest link. Which is by turns enraging and hilarious, that Jerry’s lawsuit hinges on the accusation that since Maggie wasn’t fired for botching the editing of the Zimmerman tape, then he should still be employed after purposely and maliciously editing words into a three-star general’s mouth, and since Mac did the firing in Jerry’s case—

Will thinks that Jerry should just consider himself lucky that Mac didn’t see it fit to bring him around his office before kicking his ass to the curb.

But he knows.

Mac hasn’t fully come back from where having to retract Genoa sent her. And he knows, he _knows_ , that he’s partially responsible for how close to a breakdown she came, and that the following months of having her personal life dragged into the tabloids and the continuous heckling from every corner of professional journalism and meetings with legal where Rebecca dutifully tears her to shreds in preparation for Jerry’s team undoubtedly doing the same—

It was only a few weeks ago that Mac stopped regretting that she didn’t resign.

 

* * *

 

When they step outside the AWM building and into the frigid February air, Will starts looking to hail a cab but she wraps herself around his arm, garnering his attention. “Can we walk through the park or something before we head home? I need some air.”

The conference room that Rebecca’s team has co-opted for the duration of the trial is cloyingly hot. Or so it seemed, by hour three of practice response after response to accusatory question after accusatory question. Being coached not to answer leading questions or be provoked into an emotional response. To keep to yes or no answers as much as possible and memorizing all of Becca’s hand signals.

All she could keep doing was look at the line of brightly-colored sticky notes on the inside of her folio and try to get through it all as quickly as possible.

Twenty-eight degrees is more than cold enough to help shirk the clinging heat that seems to always accompany the flux and flow of anxiety. The bitterly cold air stings her cheeks and the tip of her nose, but after four hours in an overly-heated room, it’s welcome.

She’d taken Jim out here after his depo prep, watching with her hands shoved in her jacket pockets as he physically assaulted a bench before buying him lunch and a cup of coffee on Will’s credit card—joint finances. Jerry’s lawyers have already legitimized to the judge deputizing hers and Will’s storied and ungraceful romantic past into their arguments, so while they can’t get married to avoid the illusion that they could evoke marital privilege, Will has insisted on putting her name on the lease on his apartment and all his accounts.

Which in _practice_ mostly means that she ignores him insisting that she buy herself nice things (like she couldn’t before, or something, but she’s certain this is all Will’s guilt coming into play) and instead buys things for the staff who they’re running ragged. (Thus far Maggie has made out the best with a haircut, two new work dresses from Saks, and a pair of Jimmy Choos that Mac may or may not have bullied her way into buying for her.) She cares more for walks in the park and shared showers and the general small intimacies of shared cohabitation (namely, how much warmer she is sleeping next to Will, and the way he ignores germ theory when it comes to sharing food) than money, but she knows his family never had enough of it when he was growing up, so she gets it, she does.

“Is it supposed to snow?” she asks, trying to remember what the weather forecast said this morning.

“There’s something moving in,” he answers, smiling in a small sort of way when she takes his arm as they enter Bryant Park. “Not that I put much stock in the weather people, but I think they’re calling for four to six inches overnight.”

The wind hits her legs through her thin stockings and pencil skirt and she leans heavily into Will’s side, resting her cheek against his arm, the charcoal grey wool rough against her skin. Peering around, MacKenzie sees that the park is fairly abandoned. No tabloid photographers. Next week, after the depositions, will probably be a different story, but for now she and Will are uninteresting enough to merit an undisturbed walk.

They wander aimlessly. At one point his phone rings but he lets it go to voicemail.

She hums. “It’d be nice not to have an excuse to go out tomorrow.”

“Do we need an excuse?” Will asks, scrutinizing the low-hanging clouds languishing overhead.

Snorting, she bumps her hips into his when he lengthens his stride to longer than the ones she can take. “Dear all—Will and I will not be making an appearance in the office today, despite the fact that we have made it a point to come in every Sunday for at least a few hours since the middle of September. I understand that this may be a jarring change of schedule to some of you on staff, but I would really rather keep our anchor naked in bed with me all day than share him with you—”

“Why send an email?” he laughs. “If we don’t show up they’ll assume one of us has the other chained to the bed.”

“Or that in your advanced age, you’ve broken a hip in the middle of the act—”

“Thanks,” he deadpans, although not without a hint of a smile. “You do realize you’ve casted yourself as the wanton succubus in this scenario, right?”

A giggle escaping up her throat, she squeezes his arm tighter, considering one of the benches lining the path but forgoing them in the off-chance that she freezes to one. “I prefer young and nubile fiancé, but whatever.”

“I’m more likely to fuck up a knee, anyway,” he says. Indicating a coffee stand with his hand, he mutters, “My hips are one of the few things I managed to _not_ screw up playing baseball.”

She shakes her head, tacitly declining. They can put on a pot when they get home. “I think _I’m_ the one who’s supposed to get a limp after spending the entire day getting sexed up.”

“Is that a challenge?” he asks, and she can feel his breath against her ear.

Crinkling her nose, she tries to not have a reaction. “I think there would be a certain poetry to me walking into my deposition on Monday having already been fucked too hard to walk straight. If your _knees_ can take it, I mean.”

A strong gust of wind sends her hair flying into her face and finally, she feels the cold. Scrunching her nose, she tries to brush her hair out from her eyes with gloved hands. When her movements prove clumsy (the gloves are new, and leather, and yet to be broken in) Will steps in front of her to tuck her hair behind her ears himself.

“We could, you know.”

She knows what he’s talking about, and as nice as a quiet day at home sounds in theory, she’s been in the office seven days a week if only because it gives her the chance to convince herself that she has control over things.

So she deflects, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Get sex injuries? We have. It’s been done, and we were younger then.”

Will rolls his eyes, framing her face with his hands once he finishes combing her hair back; he won’t let her deflect for much longer. Sighing, he drops an arm over her shoulder, turning them, and they continue their way through the park.

 

* * *

 

It’s hardly ever worth it to try to force MacKenzie into dropping the smiling countenance she adopts to mask her anxiety, but he figures that so long as both of them know it’s a front that’s good enough. But the winter winds have swept them along here, to a balancing place where they cannot yet afford to acknowledge the truth. Besides, Will’s not convinced that facing the enormity of the things they haven’t untangled about their relationship (old, and new, and so entirely, in many ways, uncertain and fragile) is something best done all at once.

It’s been dark and dreary, which can only be making it worse. Especially now, with dark grey clouds bearing down on lower Manhattan.

“That’s not what I—has your head cleared yet? It’s freezing out here.” He stops them again, staring down at her cold-bleached face, her pinkened cheeks, the red tip of her nose. “I mean we could not go in tomorrow. Sleep in late. Have brunch. Eat food that doesn’t come in a takeout container. Any sex which may or may not occur will undoubtedly be good enough to live up to whatever rumors the staff is spreading about us. Actually _not worry_ about the show for a day.”

(After the retraction he didn’t try hard enough. To understand what was going on her head, to help her with her guilt, to convince her he doesn’t need saving, from her or Genoa or any of it. So now he won’t stop trying.

Progress is slow, but he’s in it for the long haul. That’s what the ring on her finger is supposed to mean, anyway, even if originally it was a desperate attempt to keep her from leaving.)

MacKenzie laughs, shivering. “Impossible.”

“I’m really starting think this is a challenge,” he teases, unbuttoning the front of his overcoat to wrap it around her. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Maybe it’s a little bit of a challenge,” she concedes playfully, sliding her hands up between his sweater and button down shirt. “You got drunk after your deposition prep.”

“Very drunk. And then I fell asleep on you.” And woke up with a splitting headache on top of her still, his head pillowed on her breasts. “I just want to… every way I’m thinking of ending that sounds condescending or patronizing.”

 _I just want to make sure you’re okay._ Which Mac isn’t, not yet anyway. She’s seeing the psychiatrist she saw back when she first came home, and on antidepressants, and he’s being supportive. Or attempting to, anyway. _I just want to help_ makes it sound like they’re not engaged, like he’s some casual observer dispensing wisdom, like he hasn’t hurt her as much as he’s now trying to help. And then there’s _I just want to take care of you_ , but Mac’s a grown woman, and has gotten herself through immense adversity without him, and doesn’t _need_ him to take care of her.

“You can say that you want to take care of me,” she murmurs, her hands moving around to his back, not quite looking him straight in the eye.

But the front of her body flush against his is warm, and shortly she smiles, leaning up on her toes to bring their faces together. He wraps his arms tighter around her, continuing their ploy of shaky normalcy. “So, if you could just… let me… it’s not a bad idea to show up to your deposition well-rested and all of it.”

Laughing again, she moves so that her mouth hovers close to his. “And by ‘all of it’ you mean…?”

“Whatever you want it to mean. Although you’re the one agog with prurient interests at the moment, it would seem.”

Her lips are a few inches from his by entirely her design; he can feel her breath, tiny little exhalations measured out in grey clouds of mist, and all he would have to do is duck his head a tiny bit…

“Me?” She’s still laughing, so he thinks he’s doing something right. Her fingers dig into back, and her voice is challenging him to kiss her. “I don’t think I’m _alone_ in my prurient interests.”

“I always have prurient interest in you,” he replies, and then answers her challenge.

The park is empty but still he realizes he should be more circumspect than he has any inclination of being. It isn’t until Mac’s hands slide into his hair that he considers pulling back, but then her tongue traces his lower lip and he decides to throw caution to the proverbial wind, and when the literal wind howls low through the park his coat flutters around them and he holds her tighter, slanting their mouths together for a tighter fit. She tastes like coffee and her lipstick tastes bitter as it always has.

He doesn’t even notice the flakes starting to fall from the sky until Mac drops down off her tip toes, breaking the kiss, her eyes flickering up towards the clouds.

“It’s snowing,” she breathes.

He watches a snowflake land on the tip of her nose, and then melt. And then one on her cheek, her eyelid, her nose.

“We should probably head home,” he says, but then continues kissing her anyway.

By the time he pulls back the snow is coming down harder, flakes settling on MacKenzie’s hair and the shoulders of her coat. Giggling, she brushes some off the top of his head, and he captures her lips one more time before stepping back and buttoning his coat back up.

“Get enough air?” Will asks, taking her hand again.

MacKenzie hums, leaning her head into his shoulder as they begin to walk towards 40th Street to catch a taxi. “I think I’m a little lightheaded now, though.”

“Well then,” he says, feeling himself smirk.

He squeezes her fingers, interlaced with his, his eyes scanning the lawns that are beginning to be frosted with white.

“And cold,” she continues, and he doesn’t have to look into his periphery to know that she’s batting her eyes up at him. “And damp.”

 

* * *

 

Will doesn’t even give her the chance to get her shoes off. Her jacket, yes, which she throws over the back of one of the barstools at the kitchen island. But before she has the chance to step out of her shoes Will has stooped down to wrap his arms around her thighs and hoist her against him, setting off in the direction of their bedroom.

“Jesus Christ your legs are freezing,” he mutters.

He looks like he a few seconds away from throwing her over a shoulder, so she plants her hands near his collarbones as a preventative measure.

“Well, I wore thigh highs today instead of—”

He goes comically wide-eyed. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“Since when is my underwear relevant?” she asks, knitting her eyebrows together. Although she did regret not wearing panty hose in the middle of their walk, as the tops of her thighs began to freeze against the silk lining of her skirt.

“When isn’t your underwear relevant?” he murmurs.

“Billy!” she shrieks, laughing, and shrieking again when he dumps her onto the bed. Expecting him to crawl on top of her, or at least next to her, she starts unbuttoning her blouse, but stops when she notices Will getting to his knees. “Honey?”

His palms cover the entire tops of her thighs, and in one swift motion he pulls her to the edge of the mattress and lifts her legs to rest over his shoulders. Splaying his fingers, he runs his hands up and down the length of her legs before pushing her skirt up to her hips and pulling her panties down with as little finagling as possible.

Quietly, watching her, he traces the whorls of lace at the top of her stockings with his thumbs.

“These are nice,” Will says, voice dropping in pitch.

Biting her lip, she lifts herself up onto her elbows. “Technically you bought them for me.”

Enough pairs of silk elastic-top thigh high stockings to last her through the winter from Agent Provocateur had been one of her few purchases for herself on the Black Amex he gave her, at seventy dollars a pair.

“I can’t decide if that means I should pay more attention to my credit card statements or if I should pay less and keep letting myself be surprised,” he says, running his fingers under the elastic.

Mac snorts. “Nine hundred dollars at Agent Provocateur—”

 _“Nine hundred_ dollars? I _definitely_ want to be surprised,” he huffs, ducking his head to trace the outline of the lace against her inner thigh with his tongue.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she breathes, watching him take the lace between his teeth and drag it down a few inches on her thigh. Suddenly, she feels a lot warmer than she did a few moments ago, the chill in her limbs slowly receding the closer his mouth gets to her center. His mouth goes to her other thigh; he presses wet, open-mouthed kisses to sensitive skin joining leg and hip. Again, and again, and with purpose.

And then his mouth is there, his hands warming her legs and hips where his mouth can’t reach. Exhaling shakily, she tilts her head back, looking up at the ceiling as his tongue traces her folds, his lips setting every nerve between her legs on fire.

If this is what warming her up means to Will, she definitely has no complaints.

Moaning, she threads her fingers through his damp hair, scraping her fingernails over his scalp.

It feels _good_ , and it’s not panic, or anxiety, or the stress that seems to rule her life since she noticed the shot clock on the edited footage. Her heels press in against his back, and clumsily she tries to get her shoes off. One clatters to the floor, and then the other. She wraps her legs more firmly around his head and in response his arms wrap around her hips, pinning them to the edge of the mattress.

It’s slow, almost quiet in a way that’s entirely unlike them. She can hear his mouth moving against her wetness, suckling kisses and broad swipes of his tongue, but when he worries his lips over her clit she keens loudly, hips arching up towards his face. Will redoubles his efforts, not letting up until she cries out raggedly, tightly-coiled pleasure rippling out from her center, and she melts into the duvet cover.

When she feels him reach under her to unzip her skirt she giggles, and with her eyes still closed, lifts her hips to let him rid her of it. Next he pulls down her stockings, and then finishes unbuttoning her shirt.

“You alright there?” he asks, kissing her sternum.

Humming, slits open her eyes and, wrapping her legs around his waist, pulls him on top of her. Lazily, with aftershocks still numbing her legs, she undresses him and they make their way under the covers. His fingers find her, gently circling her clit because she’s lying on her back next to him, because it makes her shiver, because he can. She comes again, less quietly this time, shivering as she rolls onto her side, pressing herself against him.

By the time she pulls him to lie between her legs she’s no longer cold.


	2. steady with wintry calm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Many thanks to Meg for enduring my rambling while dosed on Benadryl. And to Emily and Lisa and Clare, for letting me whine about how bad I am at writing smut. And, as usual, say it with me: "This chapter is longer than anticipated." And I swear to Jesus I am going to catch up on comments before going to bed...

_Darling when the ice caps melt,_   
_When the devil's in the bible belt,_   
_Don't cower in your bed._

_I'll be on the 5:45,_   
_You can meet me at the railway line,_   
_And don't look so scared._

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t realize that he’s begun to drift off until Mac burrows back under the covers, her face pink and damp, her hair brushed and neatened.

“Come ‘ere,” Will mumbles, and she sighs happily when he rolls onto his side and pulls her against him. It takes them a moment to sink into boneless comfort under heavy layers of soft cotton sheets and cashmere blankets and a down comforter.

Her lips brush against his neck and she tries to get even closer. Sighing happily, he wraps an arm under her knees and brings her legs up to hook over his thighs, pulling her until he feels her nipples press against his chest. Mac smiles at him, blinking as her eyes adjust to how close their faces are now. He half expects her to roll back over and make a grab for her reading glasses, but instead she exhales contentedly, settling her head next to his on the pillow.

“Better?” she murmurs, after a long moment where they both almost drift off to sleep.

“Much,” he answers, stroking her hair back from her face. “You?”

“You were unrelentingly thorough.” Her fingers splay out over his chest, her mouth inches from his. He could kiss her now, again, but they’re both entirely satiated and even his bones feel heavy. One of her legs tangles between his, and she drapes an arm over his waist, smirking. “I think you’ve put me out of commission for a while.”

“That may have entirely been my objective,” he answers, laughing.

MacKenzie snorts. “I’ll admit, I’ve missed being able to work out my problems in bed with you. Although I think you did most of the work.”

“This time, anyway,” he concedes, smoothing his palms up and down her back, to her waist and hips and thighs.

“Oh, thank you.” Giggling, she brushes her lips against his.

He doesn’t let her move too far away, leaning in again to kiss her, nibbling on her lower lip. “I always appreciate your efforts, hon.” She looks less anxious now, he thinks. If it’s anything but the residual endorphins they’ll find out in an hour or two, but for now Will thinks he’ll make good on his promise on keeping her in bed for the rest of the day.

Looking out the windows beyond their little nest he thinks that maybe they could stay this way the rest of the weekend.

“It’s white-out conditions out there,” he comments, lifting his head to get a better view before reaching for the TV remote to turn on one of the local stations for a weather report.

“We’re like two hundred and something feet up, we’re probably in the clouds,” Mac muses, rolling onto her back to get a better glimpse of the snow.

“Yeah,” he says with a snort.

Looking at the clock, he discerns that they’ve been home for only about an hour, after a twenty minute cab ride from the park. Not enough time for any sort of substantial accumulation, but he bets that if he was inclined (and very much is not) to leave the bed, he wouldn’t be able to see all the way to the street from the bedroom windows.

Shifting up onto the throw pillows, he tugs Mac along to lie with her head on his chest.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I got frostbite?” he asks, almost conversationally, as Lee Goldberg on the local ABC station gestures wildly over the green screen weather map. Almost tensing, he rejects the immediate intuition that makes him want to regret opening his mouth.

But she’s always been able to make him want to have someone understand him.

Curling around his side, Mac looks up at him with arched eyebrows. “I’d have hoped that I would have noticed frostbite scars.”

“It was superficial,” he answers, absently threading his fingers through her hair again. “I was young. Maybe twelve.”

“Where?” she asks, frowning.

“My hands. We’d just had a bitch of a storm. It was late January, or early February.”

Mac takes his hand off her hip and holds it in front of her face, tracing his knuckles with one of her pointer fingers. There aren’t any scars--from the frostbite, anyway--to find, though.

“The ground had been frozen solid for months,” he continues, realizing that a nervous half-smile has made its way onto his face. “And my dad was… well, you know, and there was no way we were getting the three and a half miles to school. I forget why he was in a bad mood. It was probably enough that we were home and Mom had to work. At that point she was working at the mill in Waverley, and there was a carpool, so she could get in.” Trying not to think too hard about it, he attempts to shuffle his story into order. “I think I bundled Liz and Mickey into all the clothes they had and took them outside with me for the morning chores.”

Probably both his and his dad’s. He remembers that year being a good one by their standards, which meant that John wasn’t going through withdrawal or drinking the gas money as the profits from the last harvest dwindled to zero. But it still meant that Dad was drinking, and heavily, starting almost immediately after Mom left at 8 o’clock in the morning.

“What about Fiona?” Mac asks.

“She wasn’t born yet. So actually I was probably eleven…” His voice drifts off; his mother was probably pregnant with Fiona. It was probably why she had the job. Will shakes his head; his parents are dead and the farm has been sold. There’s no use trying to figure it out anymore. “I managed to keep them out of the house all day. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even thirty degrees and none of the hands were there, so there was a lot to be done. And Mickey always made a sport of chasing after the cats in the barn. I think Lizzie was keeping herself occupied with a litter one of them had just had. And then, I don’t know. Stupid kid shit. Snow angels--”

That, of course, catches Mac’s attention as a salient detail.

“You made snow angels?”

There’s a wide grin on her face, the kind that makes the corners of her eyes crinkle up, so he can’t possibly get defensive.

“I will deny it to anyone else,” he says with a laugh, trailing the backs of his fingers down her cheek.

“Why? It’s adorable,” she says, hugging him tightly. “Was there a snowball fight?”

He almost rolls his eyes, but then remembers that a large portion of Mac’s charmed childhood was spent overseas in homes guarded by Royal Marines and with children with whom she didn’t necessarily share a common language. Her first winter in New York City, their first as a couple, she’d dragged him out into the snow a fair few times. For someone who gets cold so easily, MacKenzie loves the snow.

“I think I threw Mickey into a snow bank at one point for being annoying,” he says. “He was six, so it wasn’t exactly _hard_... _”_

“So how did you get frostbite?” she asks, kissing his fingertips, nearly distracting him.

“Someone soaked their mittens through, and it was still early, so I gave them mine. Mom wouldn’t be home until six, so we had to make until at least then. It was probably Mickey, I think.” Liz, less than two years younger than him, would have been too careful even at nine to let that happen to hers. “I didn’t realize that your hands being warm was a sign of being frostbitten until we got under the porch lights and Liz started freaking out because my fingers were blue.”

He thinks he tried to keep them in the pockets of his jacket, but then the evening round of chores came around and by the time they saw headlights pulling up in front of the farmhouse the temperature had plummeted and it was snowing again. On the television at the foot of the bed, the weatherman calls for six to eight inches overnight.

A snow day with Mac is a study in contrast to what snow days were like when he was growing up. For one thing, _she_ makes him feel safe.

MacKenzie gasps. “Oh my god.”

“No, I mean,” he begins, hardly able to explain it. “By the time we made it back to the house Dad was passed out drunk and Mom was home with dinner, and she knew what to do and since Dad was unconscious it was a pretty nice night, after that.”

It’s one of the few times he can remember his mother taking care of him without a guilty look on her face, or without the darting eyes that meant she was waiting for Dad to come in and tell her to stop babying him. _Thank you for not angering him today,_ she had said.

“Hurt like a bitch, though,” he continues, trying to force his mother’s words from his mind. MacKenzie wraps both her hands around one of his, and he flexes his fingers within his grasp. “And it blistered. I couldn’t hold anything for a week. But, I mean, it was fine.”

The worried look on Mac’s face doesn’t flicker.

“Come on,” he says, twining a lock of her hair around his index finger. “You have to have embed tale to top that.”

 

* * *

 

She has plenty, but that isn’t the point.

Besides, at this point, he’s heard most of them. Her scars, after all, are newer. No longer raw reminders of her period of self-imposed asceticism and punishment, but faded pink, pearly lines that are easy enough to discover once her clothes are removed. And Will has taken the time to discover them all.

“You know I do,” Mac demurs, tracing idle circles into the palm of his hand. “You even have your favorites.”

Although she figures that like frostbite, its the stories that didn’t leave any outward scars that she has the most trouble finding the words for. But every contact leaves a trace, otherwise she wouldn't be swallowing Xanax at the rate she is.

“Tell me a new one,” he gently suggests.

Humming, she sifts through a glossary of memories, searching for a relatively innocuous one to tell him. “We were at a Forward Operating Base in the Hindu Kush, about a hundred miles North of Kabul, in January. It was fifteen degrees and we’d been fired upon all night by the Taliban and the trucks that were supposed to be coming in with fuel for the generators were stuck up in a pass so there was no heat but a bonfire that the unit captain started. Jim and I did a lot of huddling together for warmth. I stuck my hands down his pants a few times to screw with him.”

She looks up, gauging his reaction. Will snorts, and she continues.

“I think this is the point where I make a shrinkage joke--”

Barking a laugh, he tugs on the ends of her hair. “Cruel.” Pausing, he runs a hand up and down the length of her side, fingers curling in to feel the dip of her waist, the swell of her breasts. “So is that the approved method of hand warming then? Because I can think of a few good ways to warm my fingers down there.”

“You can feel free to stick your hands down my pants any time you’d like, Billy,” she says, and then bites her lip.

“Now you can’t just say things like that,” Will says with a laugh, curling his fingers into waist. “You have no idea how often I think about where I could be putting my hands during the day.”

“And HR already calls us AWM’s walking disaster.”

“Well,” he says, cocking his head a bit. His hands slide up to around her shoulders, bringing up the cashmere blanket to drape over them, before slipping back down her waist and hips, cupping her ass. “We could always _deserve_ the tarnish to our reputations. If half of what the tabloids are saying was true we’d be having sex on the anchor desk, which I know has only happened in my fantasies.”

Giggling, she crawls up his body to plant an open-mouthed kiss on his lips. “Wait, like, am I bent over it or am I sitting on the desktop, or--”

“Yes,” he answers shortly and unrepentantly, his smile taking on a decidedly mischievous quality.

Their smiles drop off their faces when Will’s phone rings in the pocket of his jeans where they lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

“You ignored a call earlier,” she says, and sighs, sitting up and off of him. “You should see who that is.”

Making a distinctly discontented noise he foists himself out of bed, grabbing his robe off the bedpost and shrugging it on before reaching down to extract his BlackBerry from his pants pocket. “It’s Rebecca,” he says, once the screen is in view. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Probably much more than that, Mac thinks, but doesn’t say anything as she sinks down under the blankets, curling up with her head on Will’s pillow. And then rolls towards her nightstand, reaching out to wrap her fingers around the handle on the drawer and quietly pulling it out. Refusing to come out from under the covers, she gropes blindly for the notebook she keeps next to her side of the bed.

And now Rebecca is calling Will. She tries to tell herself that it’s nothing about her deposition on Monday. But she can’t tell. Will’s half of the conversation mostly involves him saying “yes” and “no” at long intervals, and when he moves (or so she assumes) into the kitchen she can’t hear him at all.

With the top of the spiral bound notebook barely peeking out from the top of the eiderdown comforter, she pushes the pages apart, the paper crinkling under her fingertips.

They started a few days after he proposed. Before she started keeping things here, before she stashed the notebook in what has become her nightstand, in the event that she wakes up in the middle of the idea with an idea. The first ones came on the brightly-colored post-it notes that she keeps on her desk, stuck to her blotter or computer screen or hidden in her folio. Then scrawled into the margins of her legal pads or wire reports, until he found the notebook and started writing them there too, for her to find.

_Today was insane. Tomorrow will be better. Love you always. --W (12/5/12)_

The first one was on an index card, the kind he writes his notes on for broadcast, tucked into a stack of wire reports she brought into the control room with her. She kept it in her office for a while, under her keyboard, until bringing a large stack of them home with her at Christmas.

_You look absolutely beautiful today. I’m sorry I had to sneak out so early to meet with legal. I hope the latte makes up for it. Failing that, I’ve taken the liberty of making dinner reservations at Sparks. Yes, our second first date is going to be where we had our first first date, and you can’t do anything about it. Although I can’t help but feel like we’re doing this all out of order… not that I’m complaining. It’s been three days now but every time I look at you I’m reminded of how lucky I am. Love you. --W (11/9/12)_

She still has a few of the post-its in her folio (and spent the entirety of her meeting with Rebecca stealing glances at them, trying to reassure herself) and an index card or two filled with Will’s untidy scrawl.

_I cannot stop staring at your bottom lip. To be fair, this isn’t a new phenomenon, but now that I can bite it as easily as you can… to be honest, sweetheart, I’m incredibly excited that it’s Friday. Your bottom lip is incredibly biteable and I intend on doing that and… other things to keep you up all night long. --W (11/16/12)_

_You still like emeralds, right? Or I am just distracted by your eyes? --W (12/18/12)_

_I’m thankful for you. Albeit I’m thankful for you every year, but this year especially. Just need to make it another five hours and then we can throw it to the B team the rest of the week while we hole up in the Hamptons. It’s a three hour drive back to Manhattan, so there is no way we can “drop into the office” over the holiday. We’re going all the way, baby. Actual vacation. --W (11/21/12)_

She reads through a few more, until she hears him telling Rebecca that she’s already taken up enough of their time today, and yes he hasn’t been a trial attorney in almost twenty years but no, he remembers how this works so it’ll be fine, thank you very much. The notebook is stashed back in its place by the time he re-enters the bedroom, shedding his robe.

“What’s going on?” she asks, reaching out for him as he slides back into bed.

Exhaling, he tucks his face into the crook of her neck, kissing the line of her throat. “Jerry’s lawyers want to postpone your deposition. They’re using the weather as their excuse.”

Her first thought is _thank god,_ and then--

“But?”

His teeth scrape over the juncture of her shoulder; wrapping one arm under his shoulder, she combs her fingers through his thoroughly-mussed hair, shivering as he teases her frayed nerves.

“Will?”

Sighing, he rolls onto his back, staring straight up at the ceiling. Frowning, she leans up onto an elbow to scrutinize his face.

“We need to refuse to do a postponement,” he says, eyes flickering towards hers. “They’re doing it because they still haven’t found what they wanted to on you in discovery. It’s a stall tactic.”

Worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, she lowers herself on top of him. Feels her muscles begin to tense again, even as something she inherently recognizes as relief lights up in her mind.

“Okay,” she answers, voice deliberately light. Furrowing her brows together, she tucks her head under his chin.

They both know what Jerry fucking Dantana’s lawyers could find, what they’re trying to find. She’s given up all her secrets (to him, again and again and again) and now they just have to go on faith.

Kissing the top of her head, he puts his warm hands on the small of her back before circling them out, kneading the knotted muscle with his fingertips. “You will be fine,” he says, and she can feel his chest vibrating against her cheek. “I’ll be right outside, Rebecca will be there, and you know all the details, inside and out. Trust me, honey. This is a good thing.” His hands keep working her back, her biceps, her shoulders, until slowly she can relax again, her curves melting to mold against him. “Can I get you anything?”

She knows he means her Xanax.

“No, I--”

She wants to stay just like this, skin to skin and hidden away under the covers, watching the snow fall outside while the talking heads on the local news chatter on mindlessly in the background.

“I wanna stay like this,” she murmurs, hooking her fingers over his shoulders.

It’s enough.

One day he’ll learn that he’s enough.

 

* * *

 

Eventually a certain part of his anatomy reacts to Mac’s warm weight resting on top of him.

She’s asleep, or at least he thinks she is, her breathing low and even, her grip on his shoulders loosened. And he’s loathe to wake her, considering how little sleep she’s gotten in the last week in anticipation of her deposition.

Will knows what Jerry Dantana and his lawyers are trying to find. Nina found it, after all, or at least got close to it, but the burden of proof in a federal court is a much higher standard than that of _TMI_ and with all of Mac and Jim’s friends at CNN--he’s never been more thankful of Mac’s reputation of being more widely-liked than him in the broadcast journalism community--Dantana won’t get his hands on the IA reports necessary to drudge up anything relatively incriminating against her.

The PTSD is hearsay. The breakdown is hearsay. The antidepressants are hearsay.

The stabbing--Nina’s goddamn Pakistan story--is a tenuous thing, something he and Rebecca have worked on being spun to make Mac look like the hero she is if Jerry’s lawyers are stupid enough to bring it up.

But the past two weeks she’s had to recount it several times, and she’s woken up with nightmares and nosebleeds and Will just wants it to be _over_ , so Mac can realize she’s no more at fault for Genoa than the rest of them and be able to wake up at something less than a seven or an eight on the pain scale.

Rather than waking her up, he gently shifts her off of him to get up and take care of his problem in the shower. Or maybe ignore it until it goes away, so if Mac wakes up ready for round two he doesn’t have to worry about being able to perform. He pushes up gently off the bed, trying not to disturb the mattress or MacKenzie.

Yawning, he pads into the bathroom and turns on the shower, palming the hot water knob and turning it up all the way. Blinking sleepily he watches the shower fill with billows of steam to the brim of the glass walls before remembering to turn on the heated floors and walls.

Over the din of the water pouring out of the dual shower head (his apartment building _does_ boast admirable water pressure) he doesn’t hear the door open and shut behind him, and startles when a pair of thin arms wrap around his middle and a pair of familiar lips land between his shoulder blades.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to--”

Giggling, she smooths her hands down to the cut of his hips. “The bed got colder.” Her hands move even lower, and she grasps his erection. His responding groan is instinctual, and she works him with deliberate tugs and twists of her wrists until he feels himself throbbing against her palms. “You could have woken me up, you know. To help you take care of this.”

She punctuates that with a squeeze that jerks his hips forward into her hands.

“Mac,” he moans, rapidly adjusting his expectations and very much wanting to continue this, but in the shower.

They fumble past the door and under the spray, Will managing to turn her around and into his arms, steering her into the water and stooping to press his mouth to her ear, her jaw, her throat.

“I thought you could benefit from a nap.” His tongue traces the shell of her ear, and he bends at the knee to slide his hands down to her ass, lifting her against him. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“A few hours ago we were talking fairly in-depth about my prurient interests,” she replies in an airy alto, grinding her hips into his. “Besides, I could use a shower.”

“Is that all you could use?” he asks, and then licks a stripe up the column of her neck, considering backing her up against one of the two tiled walls for better leverage.

Her laugh is low and throaty, her fingers twining into his wet hair, directing his mouth to where she wants it, the sensitive tendon where her shoulder meets her collarbone. “I wouldn’t object to an orgasm.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” he answers, and mouths a kiss over her heated skin, chasing water droplets down the slope of her chest with his tongue--and then begins thinking about the physics of it, if it would be best against the wall near the shelf for her to put a foot on for leverage, which has worked for them before, or on the bench that’s installed in his shower for when it’s on the sauna setting, or if he should get her off with his fingers and the shower head and spare them the acrobatics.

Not that Mac gives him much time to contemplate, dropping her knees in front of him.

“But first, reciprocity.”

He’s keenly aware of his mouth dropping open when her lips brush against the head of his erection and she takes him back in hand, her fingers wrapping tightly around the base.

“You have always been a firm believer in parity,” he chokes out as she slides him into her mouth, her lips forming a pink ring around his flushed member, sucking until her cheeks hollow out. “But truth be told I’m already good to go, babe, and I don’t wanna disappoint you--”

He feels the vibration of her giggle all the way down to his toes, which curl up in response. And because MacKenzie rarely does anything that involves listening to him, she plants one hand on the front of his thigh and the other on his ass and then swallows as much of his length as she can, peering up at him with her wide guileless eyes.

“Mac,” he groans helplessly. “You are _really_ gonna cut things short if you keep doing that,” he finishes, faintly realizing that his voice has dropped half an octave. “Not that I wouldn’t, you know, take care of you but if you want to--”

Moving her head back, she releases him from the wet suction of her mouth to nibble at the pulsing vein on the underside of his cock. Moaning, he tilts his head back, feeling the spray from the shower head run down the back of his head.

“Billy, shut up,” she says with a smile, eyes lighting up, and then swirling her tongue around his erection to ensure his silence.

Which she does get, for half a minute longer, before he clenches his fingers in her damp hair and directs off her knees, to her feet. Turning them, he backs her up into the range of the shower head, getting her good and slippery and soaked before lifting one of her legs onto the bench. With an anticipatory gleam in her eyes she lets him brace an arm around her waist while his other hand fits down between them, his fingers seeking out the bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs.

She’s heated and tight around two fingers, even more so around three as his thumb rides flush against her clit, and he has her panting out a high note before she clambers up onto the bench, onto her knees again. Not a position he had originally entertained, but he is definitely not in the mood to complain, especially when she widens her stance on the cedar sauna bench and he can see her folds, red and glistening and when she throws a heated look back at him he steps towards her, curls the fingers on one hand around the curve of a hip, and positions himself at her entrance with the other.

“Will…” she moans as he teases her, and then moans louder when he enters her, the sound filling the small space.

Trailing a hand up and down her spine, he leans over to kiss her shoulder. “Good?”

God, he wants to make her feel good.

“Yeah,” she answers, shivering and pushing herself back against him.

He starts slowly, pulling all the way out and pushing back in with measured care--or as measured as he can be while half-mad with arousal. And he wasn’t wrong, about things being cut short. Mac is just beginning to bear down on him, the force of their movements rippling up and down her backside, when he feels his orgasm building in the base of his spine.

Trying to hold it off he shortens his strokes and clamps his eyes shut, before reaching around to rub her clit to hasten her own release.

(It doesn’t work.)

He comes with a loud groan that’s followed by a low, growling grunt, both his arms wound tightly around her waist as he thrusts sloppily into her heat.

“Fuck,” Will sighs defeatedly a minute later.

 

* * *

 

She could tell him that when he escaped into the shower that she wasn’t really asleep, and that she felt him growing hard underneath her, and honestly only followed him into the bathroom to give him a blowjob so anything more than that is kind of a bonus, but Mac thinks that _might_ make Will feel worse at the moment.

So she shushes him, reaching down to put her hand on top of his to encourage him to keep working her over.

But Will kisses her shoulder again, sweeping her wet hair out of the way, and steps away from her. Momentarily she’s confused, until she hears him pull the detachable shower head from its dock and adjust the temperature of the water.

“This work?” he asks, trailing two fingers down to her folds.

Breathing hard, she nods, and keens appreciatively when he slides his fingers inside her, hooking and pressing them forward until he finds the patch of muscle that makes her rolls her hips towards pleasure. The shower head is brought around and her hips roll harder; her hands scrabble for a tighter grip on the ledge above the bench, trying not to knock any shampoo bottles off in her haste.

“Will,” she moans.

Her mouth hangs open and her cries grow louder, more desperate.

“That’s it.” His mouth is near her ear, voice dropping even lower than it was before. “God, you are so beautiful, MacKenzie.”

Her nerves dissolve into liquid, her thighs shaking as she comes around his fingers, her voice trembling as she cries out his name again. Legs still shaking, she eases down from the bench (when Will told her well over a year ago that he had an awesome shower, she had no idea that he meant that it quite literally doubled as a sauna, among many other amenities) and, laughing weakly, falls against him.

She wastes no time in kissing him sweetly, winding her arms around his neck as he blindly puts the shower head back before wrapping his arms around her again.

They go through the motions of a shower--soap, shampoo, conditioner. Will washes her hair, scrubbing his short fingernails over her scalp and massaging her shoulders while working the suds out of her ends. She fills a washcloth with cottony-scented body wash and soaps up his shoulders and chest, and by the end of it they’re both drowsy, satiated, and relatively clean. Drying off is another joint effort that takes much longer than it should, but eventually they’re both dressed in pajamas, hair damp but combed, staggering back into bed.

“Do you want dinner?” Mac asks, yawning as they curl up half under the covers. Reaching for the remote she switches on ACN Weekend Edition, wrinkling her nose as a segment on the attacks in Aleppo and Syria begins.

Will makes a contemplative noise. “What are you hungry for?”

She’s not entirely sure that she’s hungry. Her anxiety is gone, almost entirely abated for the time being, but the pit of unease that was gripping her stomach hasn’t quite given way to actual _hunger._ But at least food is no longer a revolting prospect.

“I don’t know,” she says, and then smiles wryly. “But you sure worked up my appetite.”

Laughing, he kisses her temple. “Pizza? We can order from the place across the street. They'll probably deliver to us in this weather.”

“And then round three?” she asks. Wriggling closer to him, she trails her toes along the arch of one of his feet, laughing when his leg twitches almost violently in response and he tries to downplay how ticklish he is.

“You’re optimistic,” he says dryly, evading her foot by shoving his down under a different layer of blankets. “One of us is going to get hurt.”

“Wasn’t that the idea?” she teases, remembering their earlier conversation in the park.

He lifts an eyebrow, looking down at her. “Is that a challenge?”

Mac pretends to consider it. “Pizza first.”

“Okay,” Will says with a snort.

And it might just be the endorphins and the dopamine, but she feels _okay._ She knows there’s no way to convince him of that, that he’s capable of making her okay, through the sex and the silly love notes and the walks in the park and by just _being there_. She’s tried, of course. But their relationship is working towards something that will feel like normal once they get there and until then she can keep telling him the stories, showing him the scars, peel back the film of dishonesty they’ve built up the past six years in the hopes that he’ll get it.

She doesn’t need anything more than the knowledge that no matter where she goes, he’ll be there with her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
